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Posts Tagged ‘MIX Online’
Opinion: "Cheers to saying no"
I published a new Opinion today, which stemmed from a conversation Tami and I had about working with one potential client. I’ve been in this situation may times and it totally stinks. You’d like to get the work, you want to be nice, but you *know* that client is a total pain in the [...]
Opinion: “Design For Tables”
Okay, the title of this Opinion (Design for Tables) is purposfully a little misleading. When I’m talking of tables in this Opinion piece, written for visitmix.com, I’m talking of desiging for actual tables, or, more specifically, Microsoft Surface and other tablet/touch devices. Honestly, I to think I’d talk about desinging with actual HTML <tables> is [...]
Opinion: “Transparency Yields Better Results”
I had a really hard time writing this Opinion piece for visitmix.com, and was truly thankful to have a great copy-editor hack it down a bit for me. Originally I was speaking about the fact that the recently released application, The Archivist, has been getting use in areas of academia and law, fields we hadn’t considered [...]
MIX Online Version Two-Oh!
We released a new version of the MIX Online site yesterday and hope you’ll check it out. Our content is much more easily discoverable and readable, and we have a new lab, Incarnate.
Incarnate: Find and use your avatar anywhere
You might have noticed the cool commenting system I’m using on this blog. At MIX Online, here at Microsoft, we’ve developed a new prototype called Incarnate. Incarnate is a system that allows readers of a blog to use their already-existing avatars from common social-networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and XBox Live.
Let the visitors [...]
MIX10K Contest Opens Today
Now in its second year, the MIX team and conference brings the MIX10K contest to the community. It’s a simple contest designed to maximize creativity within strictly confined boundaries. In this case, the boundaries are file-size: namely, 10K. As well, the application must be built using of Silverlight, Gestalt or HTML5.
For a full list of [...]
MIX10 Registration Opens
For the fourth year in a row I have the opportunity to be on the team behind the Microsoft MIX conference. This year the conference will be held in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay in March, 2010. We’re going to be doing some amazing things and I welcome your suggestions on how to make this [...]
Opinion: Who gives a “gosh-darn”?
I published a new Opinion on MIX Online today, dealing with community-generated content, and some of the unforeseen pitfalls of dealing with it.
Broadcasting an audience’s live, unfiltered feedback is compelling and useful, but it also presents some challenges, most of which revolve around profanity, search results, and spam.
But what about [...]
Opinion: Away from the screen
Getting away from our screens and actually meeting people is critical to learning and growing.
We all have different personalities and quirks, and it can be hard to “put yourself out there.” Still, it seems so worth it to extend your hand and take the risk of making a connection, learning something [...]
Opinion: A Beginning Glossary for the Web Designer or Developer
I thought it would be beneficial to provide a glossary of the terms and acronyms I gloss over my previous post. Additionally, I’m hoping you, fair reader, will leave comments with additional terms and acronyms you commonly use, and would benefit the community.
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Opinion: Styleguides for web vs. events
If you’ve ever created a styleguide that has to work for both web and print, you probably know how challenging it can be—print and web are very different mediums, with very different restrictions. When you create a styleguide that works for both, you do double duty.
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Opinion: From Web, to Real World
I published a new Opinion today, talking quickly about how the Web content and ideas are migrating from the screen to the real world.
These days, though, I find “online” creeping back into the print and physical world. Fray.com, for example, has started a print version of its long-standing website, making the content available in [...]
"Oomph2: A Microformats Toolkit" Now Available
Today we released the latest version of Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit.
Microformats are about enhancing the web, representing data in HTML and moving that data around. Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit is for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats. Oomph makes consuming and producing content for the web [...]
New Opinion: I <3 hMedia
One of the nice things about hMedia is that it spans multiple media, specifically audio, video, and images, which is what people produce and consume on the web. This fact makes it attractive and we think it has good chances for widespread adoption. One of the nice aspects of hMedia is how it plays well [...]
New Opinion: How We Work
I recently posted a new Opinion on MIX Online entitled “How We Work (and sometimes skip some steps)”. It’s basically a short essay outlining in the broadest terms the process we go through here at Microsoft when creating a new website.
Oftentimes creative assets, whether they be visual comps or individual assets, are “handed over the [...]
Some new Press for MIX Online and The work we do
Two new items came across the wire today, which I thought was pretty cool. First, "Sarah In Tampa" picked up on the new update to The Archivist, which Karsten implemented in the middle of one of our MIX Online meetings. I think it’s pretty cool. As Sarah states, this new update:
Fixes a couple of bugs [...]
JS Tools in Smashing Magazine
There’s a great write up in Smashing Magazine featuring 50 of the top tools to help “improve your workflow.” Glimmer is included, I’m proud to say.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/21/50-fresh-javascript-tools-that-will-improve-your-workflow/
The Archivist
Karsten Januszewski recently sat down and wrote a WPF application that will search the Twitter archives and allow users to save the search results as an XML file or export to Excel.
New opinion: card sorting
During the initial exercise in working out the I.A. for the PDC09 site, we used the process of “card sorting.” It had been a while since I had gone through that exercise, and remembered how very useful it can be.
Glimmer love from the jquery blog
One of the most interesting happenings this week was the release of Glimmer. Glimmer allows you to easily create interactive elements on your web pages by harnessing the power of the jQuery library. Without having to hand-craft your JavaScript code, you can use Glimmer’s wizards to generate jQuery scripts for common interactive scenarios. Glimmer also [...]
Flotzam: screencast of the week
Betsy Weber just published a nice blog-post regarding Flotzam, the WPF application Karsten Januszewski and I (with some great help from Hans Hugli) developed and have been running at the MIX and PDC conferences for the last 3 years. Check it out!
Designing Glimmer in WPF
Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool is a prototype from the Mix Online Labs which makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the “write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers.
Opinion: Capturing the Ineffible
I got in touch with a friend recently, kinda randomly. He’s an incredible motion-graphics designer, and I’ve always admired his skills. He recently wowed me with not only a beautiful short-reel, but some User Interface work he’d been doing for mobile devices. I was surprised: our worlds were converging in a way I hadn’t anticipated. [...]
Oxite on MIX Online
We released a new project today named Oxite:
Oxite is “an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.” Duncan Mackenzie’s team of web ninjas worked feverishly on taking the MIX Online code base and making it available to all of our users! We [...]